Drop

Table

May 11 2020, Schoorl, Netherlands

And now a bit of Ingeborg Bachmann:

'The Drugs, The Words

Said it,
and the toad leapt
onto the table,
blew the match out
and the lightning
struck under the table,
lifted the glass,
and the drop
spilled into the sea,
meaning tears,
none of them dried,
which means a sea,
something quite other,
though there’s only one,
suffering not being
the worst thing
to popes, to ideas,
to states, but rather
a torture for the sane.

The sick know
that a color, a breath of air,
a hard step, indeed a
whimper of grass in the world
turns the heart inside
the body, causing them to hope
for peace the more they sense
war, as the war goes on.
They love
the white uniforms
of the nurses.
They hope that
from the white
something good will come.
They are not
white at all.